Sara shakes off her past

Pleasance Dome (Venue 23) JJJJ “What piece of work is a man?” Flesh And Bone explodes on to the stage as if Shakespeare was alive and well and living in a tower block in east London. Elliot Warren’s blistering text blends Shakespearean language and East End slang with apparent seamlessness in the mouths of people who live in abject poverty.

Terence (Warren) is a 21stcentury guttersnipe of the high-rises. His girlfriend Kelly (Olivia Brady, who codirects with Warren) works sex chatlines for extra cash. They live “squashed together” in a rat-infested flat with Reiss (Michael Jinks), Tel’s brother, who is afraid to admit he’s gay, and Grandad (Nick T Frost), who becomes for a moment, a kind of King Lear figure as he talks about the loss of his love, Eliza. Their neighbour Jamal (Alessandro Babalola) is the “hardest bastard on the block”, but beneath the mask it’s a different story.

Flesh And Bone is the first show by Unpolished Theatre, founded last year by Warren and Brady, recent graduates from drama school in Bournemouth, and comes to the Fringe with the support of the Pleasance’s Charlie Harthill Special Reserve Fund. The energy and heightened language owes something to Steven Berkoff ’s East, which Warren and Brady acted in, but they make the style their own, dragging it kicking and screaming into 2017.

In this “rotten shitstorm of concrete housing”, these characters live and love and fight and dream. The play’s elevated language spliced with realism allows them to talk about who they are underneath: vital, interesting, multi-dimensional souls who want to live fruitful lives. It’s fitting that, when the play hurtles towards its conclusion and bulldozers threaten their homes, they are prepared to defend this “merry, miserable life” to the end. SUSAN MANSFIELD Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33) JJJJ Wearing a swimsuit, fishnet stockings, white lab coat and bow tie, presumably because they reflect important aspects of her life and her recent break with the past, conventions and possibly, sanity, this is a watershed moment for Sara Pascoe.

Not only is she single for the first time since 2001, but she’s largely eschewed the deep scientific research that

0 Sara Pascoe offers radically offbeat solutions to entrenched cultural problems basement for their highly engaging late-night spot. With Danish oud (Arabic lute) player Joachim Robert Hvid joined by French saxophonist Yann le Glaz, Istanbul-based Scots percussionist Stuart Dickson and Bulgarian Georgi Dimitrov on the kanun, a middle-eastern zither-like instrument, they generate a beguiling swirl of Turkish gypsy music which, you can’t help feeling, would be best heard from café tables, washed down with Turkish coffee or something even stronger.

The vividly contrasting timbres of their instruments weave an ornate and constantly shifting tapestry of sound. A tune might be brought in by a bright cascade of notes from the kanun before the saxophone states a reedily melancholic theme, made her name in her more recent shows and memoir, Animal, even if an occasional bit of book learning sneaks out of these highly personal anecdotes like a rogue pubic hair from her greatly valued Marks & Spencer’s knickers.

Indeed, with its occasional veneration of incest and wholesale dismissal of art at the world’s biggest arts festival, Ladsladslads feels as determined an effort to shake some of Pascoe’s recently acquired fanbase as her dumping of her boyfriend for Christmas.

Theatre, jazz and art galleries get particularly short which becomes more purposeful as Dickson’s darbuka or other percussion comes rattling in and the microtonal phrasing of the oud laces its way through the melody.

Highly improvisational, their music is frequently spun out to complex time signatures, perhaps with what sounds like a stately procession accelerating into a dance. Some clearer explanations of the various pieces would have been welcome, but as the different instrumental voices, plangent or glittering, played off each other and the audience started clapping along to the rhythm, there was no evidence of any communication barrier, while loud demands for an encore further confirmed that the music itself was casting its benign spell. JIM GILCHRIST shrift. But she maintains that stand-up is no artistic endeavour either, anointing herself a craftsperson, building solid, or otherwise, comic furniture. As with her research into evolutionary biology, she’s been systematic, clinically approaching a half-year of solitary celebrations of singlehood as a way of generating material. Regrettably, these spiritual self-explorations have merely dredged up her worst insecurities and personality traits, which she expands on with rare and refreshing candour.

Whatever her process though, she’s offering Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33) JJJ Dane Baptiste has the potential to be one of the UK’S top comics, perhaps even the US’S too if his BBC Three sitcom isn’t recommissioned.

He’s got a great show in him but G.O.D. isn’t it. The abbreviated words in his title indicate the reach of his ambition, exploring the extent to which gold, oil and drugs have become quasireligious goals for society.

Had this triumvirate been less strictly adhered to, he might have triumphed, as his opening section on economics is smart, timely and punchily hilarious, a supremely impressive radically offbeat solutions to entrenched cultural problems, contriving a philanthropic correction to prescribed gender roles from her own profligate masturbation.

At one point, she gets a little too sidelined by youth culture’s subversion of Harry Potter iconography. But otherwise, Pascoe’s preoccupations seem less and less disparate and disconnected as the show develops, not through their own inherent logic, but the sharp, selfquestioning, utterly unique brain that’s presenting them. JAY RICHARDSON 20-minute set. Sharp analogies, like money being the deadbeat father in his life, stand alongside inventive euphemisms, with Baptiste brilliantly flitting between the convictions of an authoritative sage and the reluctant disclosures of a would-be player who still keeps an eye on his overdraft.

There are tremendous variations between routines, from fake ads for his income sidelines to a persecuted male critique of the song No Scrubs. Generally funny on religion too, the Catholic-raised comic loses focus when it comes to oil, too indistinct from gold to support the same depth of comic analysis, before drugs desperately segues into disconnected musings on fulfilment and morality. JAY RICHARDSON Greenside @ Nicolson Square (Venue 209) JJJ Following their 2016 Fringe debut, The Life And Times Of Lionel, Leeds theatre company Forget About The Dog return with another highly physical show exploring the clash between our interior and exterior lives.

Cat wakes up in hospital following an accident, and has trouble remembering certain things – things like the words “grotty” and “sentimental”, or how to tie her shoelaces.

As with Lionel, the company have great fun depicting the inner workings of Cat’s mind: she’s transported to imaginary war zones and game shows, bodily manipulated and interrogated by her own psyche. It’s inventive, though sometimes less than satisfying – a journey into Cat’s “primitive brain” doesn’t really pay off, and Cat’s intelligence is represented rather excruciatingly by “Isaac and Quentin” – because IQ, geddit!?

With all that mental playfulness, the world outside Cat’s brain has some work to do in grounding the narrative, and it does this well – Cat’s sister Grace is a fully realised character with her own faults and frustrations, and far more than just the “supportive sibling” Cat might have had.

It’s a small thing, but the minimal set design is also praiseworthy: a white tape outline, with jagged cracks around the edges hinting at Cat’s fractured mental state. NIKI BOYLE Just the Tonic at The Caves (Venue 88) JJ This is a mess, sadly. I strike that note of regret as Mabey is a likeable performer. She’s physical, expressive and has a good off-the-cuff rapport with her audience. But her gags are weak and unfocused.

This rambling hour of eager-to-please kookiness feels like an unfinished early draft and ends with an interminable, garbled routine in which she memorises every two-letter word in the Scrabble dictionary. PAUL WHITELAW